Views and news from our life as it goes along - from rebuilding ruins in Portugal, adventures in Scotland through post-disaster recovery around the world where disasters and poverty are permanent overlords.
These are some of our stories and quests for transition

Saturday, 14 March 2009

Plan for our land - Adega and straw bales

Next in the series, this time in Portuguese as well / Também em Português que é traduzida abaixo do parte Inglês

This list of posts, about our land, progressing at the pace of The Snail is here, with the bits already done shown.

The adega is a single storey ruin with the roof falling in, attached to the house, forming an “L”. It’s main feature is that the back wall is the hill itself – a huge face of granite rock. The other walls are fashioned outwards from it. The roof had rested on notches at the top of this rock.

Here we will raise a new first floor – for the kids rooms. This is pretty much the only bit of new building around the main house. We want to go for straw bale construction, probably with light timber frame on the South facing side – because glazing may exceed 50%, but partially to placate the local planning office who have never seen a straw bale application or building and are likely to be slightly phased / chuck it in the REJECT pile.

On the North side we may get away with load bearing (this is where the straw bales provide the structural strength – rather than a timber frame with the bales filling in between but taking no load from the roof). This is far less expensive than using a timber frame structure because of high timber cost. There is now plenty of precedence of load bearing buildings: up to three floors high.

Time frame for this straw build is between July and September. Depends on harvest time for straw – which should be around July I’m told. Let us know if you want to participate, learn, labour, cool your roasting self in mellow river for siesta time option.

Straw is harvested in July, so the straw bale elements will probably start in late July or early August. Very hot then, so we could delay that till September. This also depends on who we can secure as the trainer / lead builder for the straw build.